FTessaro - Lead Programmer
This month I spent the majority of my time improving new and current systems. As part of that focus, code in general received some significant improvements and cleanup. Diets, Insects & Migration received some minor additions while we are still polishing them in QA. Our focus right now is ensuring they are fun and balanced, which is often more difficult than developing the mechanic itself.
You’ll be glad to know that corpse detection is now far more reliable and we added rigged skeletons (generics for now), which will allow them to be carried or dragged. In combination with shaders, VFX and organs this can be really macabre.
Hardened fruits like coconuts now have a chance to fall from trees and open upon impact with the ground, allowing animals ill-equipped to break them to have an opportunity for sustenance.
Added the Death screen from Legacy, with some improvements made to the Loading Screen and performance of the HUD UI in general.
Added new camera behaviors that interact with certain abilities like eating/drinking/pickup and just movement in general. These are not the final changes and the camera will continue to be expanded upon as development progresses. Other minor changes were made to Vocals, Humans, Interactable Foliage, the Troodon Venom Pounce and more.
Finally, I updated the NVIDIA DLSS plugin and implemented an alternative for non RTX users, AMD FSR2. Which will hopefully allow a wider range of players to enjoy a boost to their performance. It will also come alongside a variety of new graphic and game settings aimed at granting players increased quality of life.
See you next time everyone!
Amar0k - Programmer
This month I've been working on finishing the new scavengers and flier/swimming AI. The scavengers are complete and have moved to testing. Fish AI has had a big overhaul of movement and fleeing; they are now much more active and reliable with full rotation and interactive movement. Performance improvements have also been a part of these recent changes so we can allow more AI on the map.
Also the new animal AI framework is coming along nicely with more performant logic and reliability this will scale across to the new dinosaur AI. I have also been working on a complete AI behavior debugger to allow easier testing and for collecting performance data. Some small changes to the anti cheat also with an updated module and upgraded permissions.
dmIV - Programmer
This month I mostly worked on human related things. The biggest addition would probably be prone support. It works similarly to crouching and I was able to reuse some existing code fortunately which made the implementation significantly faster. There are some significant differences though, such as the character’s collision being shorter, limited sideways camera turning or the movement being restricted to crawling forward and backwards for now.
Our humans use what is called a “true first person” system. Most first person games attach the arms and equipment to the camera directly and add the legs separately if at all. We wanted to try a different approach and take the same character you would see from third person and place the camera where the eyes are. This presents many challenges that I looked at.
First of all, sometimes the character’s head can clip inside walls or the floor during certain animations. I ended up creating a system that dynamically adjusts the location of the mesh to prevent that from happening. It’s a pretty effective solution that fixes the problem without being noticeable. The second issue I tackled was being able to look down your own neck, since that doesn’t feel very natural if we’re being honest. It mostly came down to doing the math to limit the camera movement appropriately.
I also set up prone related animations and made some tweaks to existing ones. Most of our current animations are placeholders until we’re ready to make proper ones, but I made some improvements to them so that we have something better for the time being.
Bryan - Animator
Pretty much my only project this month has been gore. Lots of gore. All our Dinosaurs now have a spinal column, ribs and that bit of meat you can never really pick off the bone. For the most part I’ve stuck with skeletal diagrams to keep the skeletons reasonably true to the real animals with the notable exception of the Omniraptor where I referenced a Deinonychus skeletal and then just kind of winged it based on that.
Stegosaurus is probably my favorite so far, it looks so cool without the plates. Very satisfying collection of bones to work on. As you can probably imagine, Tenontosaurus’ tail took a while seeing as that animal is at least 90% tail. It’s been a fun process really, putting a skeleton together is a little like playing with Lego.
For now we don’t have other bones, just vertebrae, cervical ribs, thoracic ribs and tail chevrons but there are a bunch of other juicy, squishy bits you’ll find in the middle of a Dinosaur as well.
Lastly, we have gore morphs too. If you chew on a corpse, you’ll notice it actually gets eaten now, revealing all those bones in the body. Don’t forget to pluck out the eyes first before someone else gets them.
VisualTech48 - 3D Environment Artist
This month was a wild prop one yet again, I’ve first added the Portable Generator, which will be used heavily by the humans while restoring bases.
It needs fuel of course, (duh) but its an essential to any new human settlement.
Secondly I’d like to introduce the Spotlight, with a vintage flare, that will light up the way and areas on the island in the future:
With alongside it I’ve wrapped up and finished the large Searchlight (hint, it will be movable):
And lastly, I’d like to introduce a human item, The Crowbar:
Besides the finished props, I’ve started to work on our Cages, which will be featured in five different sizes. Its a work in progress, so it is of course subject to change.
See you next month!
Tapwing - 2D Artist
It’s time for our nimble, single crested “friend” the Monolophosaurus.
With a nose like that it made sense that it’d be a master of it’s sense of smell, but how to best use that as a mechanic? Being able to zero in on targets more easily or being able to catch scent of something from further away were starting ideas, but then another experimental idea was pitched that I quite liked. Why not a projectile of sorts, or rather a scent trap.
This substance is something that Mono could use to either mark a target to keep track of it during a hunt or lay a trap for careless creatures that step through this substance and make themselves easy-to-chase prey for Monolophosaurus.
Water and mud would be your best friend to wash off the stench with this guy running around.
Wedge - Sound Designer
I started this month with a continuation of the progress on Beipiaosaurus vocal sounds, some more supplementary sounds such as vomit and death vocals. Additionally I worked on some sounds for the juvenile stage including its underwater vocals and some of its attacks.
My focus shifted through the month to working on some basic sounds for humans. I have created a bespoke footstep shoe layer to be used as a sweetener on current footsteps as a placeholder which works well for now. I have also designed some basic sounds for combat including punch and kick movement and some satisfying impacts in addition to a generic close combat weapon swing sound. To complete this basic set of sounds I am working on some generic breathing to be used at various stages, including resting, a moderate breathing for exerting and movement and a fatigued stage of breathing for injury and stamina depletion.
With the impending gore update I have done a complete overhaul to gore sounds currently used for each size category, this includes biting, chewing, gorging, tearing and ripping. All these sounds already existed and could be heard through actions such as eating or grabbing meat but have been replaced with new sounds intended to be more visceral and weightier.
I’ve also been giving Troodon a bit more attention, improving some of its existing sounds such as its bite vocal and sniffing sounds. In addition I’ve been designing some new vocals to complement the venom mechanic with a unique vocal, each increasing in intensity, to signal each stage of the envenomation process.
As always along with active progress I’ve put some time into minor QOL adjustments and bug fixes, some of the more significant being updated deep mud footsteps to be used in mud pits, ensuring all ambient AI animals produce footstep sounds and improving wing flap sounds for Pterodactylus.